A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story (6 page)

Dick doesn’t think so: “We’ve been recommended to a psychiatrist, who wants to see us first. Doesn’t that ring a bell with you?”

Should it? How do I know Dick isn’t right? Despite Aunt Ruby’s bracing words, maybe I am guilty. I’ve been harboring secret thoughts of leaving my marriage, but I don’t want to leave. I fear if I leave I’ll no longer be a good person, fear letting go, fear losing some small kernel of hope that I might still be a good person.

I’m unnerved by the doctor, unnerved by his psychiatric expertise. He’s supposed to help Temple, but already he’s advising us in his sibilant accent that, when Temple reaches her teens, she should be psychoanalyzed. What does he think she’ll reveal about herself when she’s a teenager? Or about me? Pieces of me are already missing. Between Temple and Dick, I’ve pushed them down a black hole.

Will the doctor define Temple? Will he name her disorder as Adam named the animals? Dick likes names, hounds me with them, forces me into corners—sharp black and white corners that allow no escape.

“Retardation,” Dick says.

“It’s not that simple,” I counter.

“It is simple. You make it complicated, so you won’t have to look at what you’ve done.”

“What have I done?”

Dick makes no answer, his focus is on a win-lose battle. Thus far, he sees my insistence that Temple’s improved as my having won the first round, and it infuriates him. Fury has become his attack weapon, his release from tension, his aphrodisiac. It has a rhythm now, like sex. I have sex with him to contain his fury, but it doesn’t assuage his burning need to be right.

“When I married you, you were a good girl.”

I’m no longer good?

“When I married you, you were economical.”

“Temple has serious medical problems.”

Dick doesn’t accept that as an answer. He has money, old, conservative money that talks to him in neat balance sheets, and it annoys him to spend it on Temple. Yet, he would pay for an institution, pay more than he pays now, if only to prove he’s right. Long ago his money talked to me; it seemed like a romantic largesse out of Scott Fitzgerald. I didn’t know then how it could be used to pinch life into the sharp, angled cursive that I recognize now, upside down in the notebook in front of the doctor.

Please God, what has Dick written? Did Dick send that notebook to Dr. Meyer? And has she sent it on to this doctor? Did Dr. Meyer tell this doctor about my request for a marriage counselor? My own handwriting is schoolgirlish and will never have the strength to hold out against those tight bands of cursive. Dick has also taken to writing me accusing letters and leaving them on my side of the bed. He lifts words out of my mouth and reshapes them to his own argument.

“Yes, that’s what I said,” I say, trying to defend my intention, “but that’s not what I meant.”

The doctor looks down at Dick’s notebook. His lips are pursed. I wait for his sibilant words. My heart thuds. The veins in my hands swell up with shame. I hold still, hold very still as I’ve learned to do. Stare at my swollen hands and watch like a rabbit out the corner of my eye. The doctor has only to flash his badge; expertise is my enemy. I fear its flick lash and brace myself like a child called into the principal’s office.

“It is autism. Infant schizophrenia.”

Dick picks up the doctor’s words and runs with them. Face tight, eyes stern, mind racing along the same old kenneled intention, he gives himself permission to name his child “unacceptable.”

Just as quickly, comes the doctor’s backtracking denial. “I didn’t say that, I said she manifested autistic symptoms.”

Too late, the words have escaped. Loosed from their human code, they’re already metastasizing. I sense danger but don’t see how to fight it. I know the good man Dick wants to be, but I also know his impatience with any argument but his own. Most of all, I know his commitment to rules and authority: “If somebody will just tell me what to do,” he says repeatedly, “I’ll do it.”

Now the words have told him what to do.
*

The next time I see Temple’s doctor, I’m alone. He’s had a session alone with Temple. He tells me that Temple has been psychotic, an infant schizophrenic, but that now she’s convalescing and has become a neurotic.

Like the rest of us?

The doctor looks at me as if he smells something faintly unpleasant, and names me an hysteric. “Oil and water don’t mix,” he says. “There is no teamwork between an obsessive like your husband and an hysteric.”

I’m not sure what “hysteric” means and am afraid to ask. Later, I learn that in Victorian terms, it means a woman who is too much the individualist; in Freudian terms, it’s a woman who wants a penis. Not knowing either definition, not even sure what he means by “obsessive,” I show no reaction; I smile tentatively, hoping to please him, praying he has the solution, the key, the formula. It’s like a spy scene. What does he want from me? What am I supposed to know that he’s looking for?

Was I depressed when she was born? he asks. No, I answer, then try to explain that Dick doesn’t have very many friends. He says that’s “quite suitable,” he knows many men like that. He purses his lips. How many friends do I have?

I try to think. Finally, I say, “three close friends in the winter, two where we go in the summer.”

He approves of this. “One should not have too many good friends.”

Does “too many” mean shallow? I don’t know. Much later, I learn this is the first test, and I’ve passed it.

I try to convince myself that I like this doctor, but we don’t smile; we don’t joke. I have no medical experience with psychiatrists, so I don’t know if jokes are allowed. I think of an old boyfriend, also a psychiatrist, who used to love jokes. I know the doctor knows this man and doesn’t like him, hasn’t liked him since the two men interned together. Now he questions me about him, presses me on our relationship. Out of curiosity? Dislike? Why can’t I in return ask him why he hates my old boyfriend?

The doctor suggests that perhaps Temple should be in a foster home. My stunned face betrays me and he drops the subject as fast as he’s brought it up. Next, he instructs me to tell my husband to stop using the word “schizophrenic.” I don’t dare say that he’s the one who used it first. Another thought. Have he and Dick been talking together alone? About what?

Suddenly, curiously, I hear the doctor exclaim that he wished he hadn’t used the word “schizophrenic.” It’s our first spark of friendship.

I go home. I continue to drive Temple to Mrs. Reynolds three times a week. I hide my feelings, to protect Temple, to keep us both safe. Or is it to keep me frozen so I won’t feel the despair that descends after each of Dick’s tirades?

“She’s insane.” He now has psychiatric proof. “You won’t admit it; that’s why you won’t institutionalize her!”

How do I know he isn’t right?

One night comes the big weep: such hard sobbing, I think I’m going to strangle on my own tears. Great salt gobbets of grief are stuck in my throat. The next morning I wake exhausted and promise myself that never again as long as I live will I cry that hard. Then comes an odd sense of relief. I’ve peered into the black hole, and I’m still alive. I’ve named my despair and this sunny morning I’m living with it and it’s almost a friend. I make my first big resolve: whatever the stakes, whatever the odds, I will not let Dick put Temple in an institution. I’ll take it one day at a time, as the alcoholics do.

I make a second resolve: I will keep my head up out of the dark; I’ll allow myself to breathe. Have I been holding my breath all this time? Yes, and it’s been keeping me from thinking. I’ll breathe; I’ll think.

First thought: between the nanny and Mrs. Reynolds, Temple has improved markedly. I can see that for myself, so forget Dick’s argument that I’m in denial.

Second thought: the reason I can never win an argument with Dick is because he’s too impatient to hear me out and get my point. Instead, he latches onto the first peripheral that will justify what he wants to justify and shouts me down. So, forget trying to show him how Temple—a living, growing child—is improving. He’s made up his mind she’s a capital investment: she should be institutionalized because that’s what the medical authorities are prescribing these days, and he’s put a lot of money into their advice. Unfortunately, that’s a point in his favor. We live in a conservative world where those deemed “unfit” are routinely separated out and institutionalized.

“Unfit for what?” I ask, unwilling to give in.

For a moment Dick looks baffled, then bullies his way back to where he started. “It’s not the way it’s supposed to go!”

The specter of Bruno Bettelheim rears its head. His book,
The Empty Fortess
, is on the bestseller list and everybody thinks he’s a genius. Bettelheim believes that autistic children behave like concentration camp inmates, that they suffer from the same helplessness as prisoners who’ve given up hope, that they are wasting away like prisoners who refuse to eat, that they avert their gaze, as did prisoners who avoided eye contact with the guards. Bettelheim believes autistic children, like concentration camp inmates, are trying to blot out an immediate, threatening reality—the SS in the camps, their mothers in the home.
*

Does the Viennese doctor believe in Bettelheim? Why not? Both men are European; both look to be Freudian. Is it possible that the doctor feels guilty to have escaped the Nazis, while Bettelheim was forced to suffer Dachau? Not impossible. Nevertheless, even if that’s so and I’m really the horrible creature Bettelheim’s diagnosis says I am, then why try to please one of his disciples?

Holding on tight to these first shaky steps to maturity, I pick up another thought. What could have caused the rift between Temple’s doctor, an arrogant, proper European, and my old boyfriend, a lanky, laconic Westerner from Nebraska? The boyfriend was brilliant, irreverent, and funny—one of Oppenheimer’s fair-haired boys before he switched from physics to psychiatry. Had he made fun of the Viennese doctor when the two of them were interning? The doctor was an easy mark; Germans don’t get our tongue-in-cheek irony. They don’t understand Jimmy Stewart.

A chink, I think I found a chink! The doctor is human. He will no longer intimidate me.

Ah, but with a heavy heart, I guess I’ll have to accept his diagnosis. Temple may well be suffering from infant schizophrenia, brought on by a psychosocial trauma. And maybe, just maybe—even if I didn’t mean to—I’m the one who brought it on.

Boy, that’s a bitter pill.

OK, I accept it, but, as Aunt Ruby advised, I won’t weep and wail. If Temple’s problem is psychosocial, then it’s time to look for psychosocial clues.

First, I thumb through old college textbooks, get as far as the startled response and feel waves of boredom creeping over me. The plodding, literal focus of Psych. 101 offers no clues to autism, so as fast as I can I turn back to my true love, which is literature. At least literature will give me the illusion of addressing Temple’s problems while allowing me to run away from them. But something’s changed. Now I find I’m drawn like a magnet to Victorian novels full of dark family secrets and wicked, autocratic men. I’m also drawn to Victorian ghost stories, perhaps because what lurks about, unspoken, between Dick and me feels sort of like a ghost. Most of the time we talk practicalities but always hovering around the edge are the unanswered questions about Temple: like why had Dr. Meyer come up with her demand that I explain Dick to her. What did he say to her unbeknownst to me? And what has he written to the new doctor? Where did the new doctor get the idea of farming Temple out to a foster family? I like to think Dick cares for Temple, but I wouldn’t want to bet on it. For the time being, he simply allows her to exist under the same roof.

Continuing my literary search, I prowl around in the spoiled, uneasy world of Scott Fitzgerald, then, best yet, I light on Henry James. Here are social battles I know by heart: women struggling to hold their own in a Boston only two generations removed from the one I live in. James’ understanding of the way in which we are both the product and victim of the society we live in leads me to read Erik Erikson’s recently published
Childhood and Society
. An innovative leader in the field of psychoanalysis and human development, Erikson writes that our psyche is made up of more than a Freudian ego developing in lonely isolation. Coining the term “identity,” Erikson describes us as a combination of individual development, family, community, and nation. All these elements impact on our ego, and our ego on them.